Getting Through the Basics

The first few days were pretty easy compared to Calypso. They were very organized in their approach to introducing you to the planet, though listening to some of the lectures was a bit boring due to the fact that I had been living on a planet that wasn't Earth for quite some time now. The basic equipment they let us take a look at was adequate, though nothing spectacular compared to what I had been handling before, luckily I had a few of the tools I brought with me when I flew to this planet and since I had already modified them a bit it would save me some work making sure I could remain anonymous on this planet as well. I didn't have any problems syncing my handheld device with their network either, they had made it fairly open for us due to all the changes in technology on the various planets we were coming from. Mine, surprisingly, looked very outdated from the ones I saw and so I determined I would need to work on it a bit more to make it look a little newer and have all the features I needed. After finishing all the courses they had for the new arrivals I wasted little time getting out of the facility and starting the process of living off the land, well, at least as much as any of us can. There were many new types of resources I hadn't seen before and some that were very familiar. The technology they utilized on this planet was harder to hack, which meant that most of it was not repairable, but it would do when I had need of it, for now I was good with the equipment that I had.

After a few days of learning I had already picked out a handful of favorite spots, though I couldn't help but want to wander here. The ruins scattered all around were marvelous to behold, they held secrets that I couldn't wait to learn about, though they would not let us look for any artifacts yet, they were, however, making preparations to provide training so that we could soon. I had high hopes of helping find new technologies in the ancient ruins and hoped to figure out the history of this planet. I wondered how the Arkadians, who had made such a thing as The Signal, could have lost to the Oratan, we had clearly found a way to survive at least this long, but perhaps there was something we were missing and the full onslaught hadn't happened yet. I also wondered where the ships were and why the Oratan that remained here didn't seem to have any vehicles or ships to get them around. This troubled me a bit as well, if these were just the remnant of what had been here before, would we soon have another war on our hands when their ships arrived? The robots had been enough before, but these creatures seemed just as dangerous. I knew eventually I would have to do some more training in weapons, but for now I would just take my time learning about this planet, worst case would be I'd have to learn the hard way, but I was used to that.

Mining here was much like it was there, there was a lot of time to think about things. I took some of this time that I had to continue trying to look into what happened and where the time went, but all I could see was that for a while there were postings with a bounty on my head, though always for me to be alive, not that I could have died if they shot me anyway, and then they started to fade into the background, no news of my capture, a few people inquiring for an update on the bounty status but in the end the final word was: "Bounty Canceled", which made me assume that they thought me dead. But why would they think that? Clearly they must have been able to at least somewhat follow the trail of my jump, most people can't really move around much without being at least partially tracked. I suppose it was possible that when the chip had been damaged they lost that capability, but it seemed unlikely. I even looked through the logs on my device, but it seemed that there was no gap in them, one day I was looking into things and then the next day according to the logs I had escaped from my captors. I had even had to force the thing to sync up briefly with a network to get the correct date and time, which then really threw things through a loop, but at least now I know when it is. I keep wondering what happened and the only thought I have that makes any sense to me so far is that somehow the surge that went through the chip and fried it somehow also bent time and threw me forward almost a year. It didn't seem likely, and I recalled many stories that existed in our history that fancied this would be possible, but it still seemed strange that it could really happen. Then of course that leads me to think that if I can jump forward, could I also jump back? And what implications would there be if this were possible? It also makes me wonder what exactly our brains are capable of, if we can do this with technology magnifying our natural abilities then would it be possible that with the right modifications and practice I could master the ability to travel not only the space around me but the time that the space existed? These thoughts were distracting, and because of them I had almost missed a very good find, so once I caught it and realized how much I would have missed out on I quickly moved on from this thought process, determined that if I wanted to visit it again I would have to wait until I was resting.